What Empathy Can(not) Do. An Inquiry into the Epistemic Possibilities and Limits of Empathic Imagination.

In my dissertation, I am going to argue that empathy is a cognitive process through which we imagine another’s first-person perspective in a given situation. Empathy aims at providing empathizers with an insight into “what it feels like” to be in somebody else’s shoes. I call this phenomenon phenomenal insight. In light of this account, I am going to show some of empathy’s major epistemic possibilities and limits. The dissertation is so structured. In Chapter I, I will engage with the literature devoted to the definition of empathy. From this debate, I extrapolate a pattern of basic features that are shared by most accounts. I then introduce the definition of empathy I will be dealing with throughout the present work. In Chapter II, I engage with the view that regards empathy as capable of providing us with an understanding of other people's reasons for action, where reasons are to be taken as constituted by a belief-desire couple. I criticize the belief-desire model and argue for the inclusion of emotions as full-right reason-giving states. I show how emotions' main source of motivation can be found in the way in which they are phenomenally experienced by subjects. I then argue for phenomenal insight as a way to grasp the reason-giving dimension of emotional states. Attached to this chapter I put an Appendix in which I explore more in detail how it is possible for us to first-personally imagine emotional states. In Chapter III, I argue that what can be empathically imagined is bound to the kind of individuals we are, i.e. to our preferences, values, dispositions, etc. When trying to imagine other people's perspectives, traces of our “selves” can be found in what and how we imagine. I use the case of “imaginative resistance” as a vivid example of this phenomenon. I further defend my claims by resorting to some relevant empirical work in social psychology and neuroscience. In Chapter IV, I engage with the debate on transformative experiences (TEs). TEs could, indeed, be interpreted as highlighting major limits of our imaginative capabilities due to the kind of selves we are. The stock of experiences we had constrains our capability to conjure up the relevant imaginings about experiences we did not personally undergo. At the same time, the kind of “self” we are impedes us to fully appreciate a different self’s perspective. In Chapter V, I show how the challenges to empathy explored in the previous chapter can be counterbalanced. This allows me to show some surprising features of empathy that are seldom discussed in contemporary literature, namely the possibility to learn via empathy and the possibility to change via empathy. On the one hand, I show how empathy, by stretching our imagination, can provide us with phenomenal insight into experiences we did not actually undergo. On the other hand, I show how empathy, by exposing ourselves to new perspectives, can change us as individuals.